Online report of the Progressive Review. For 53 years, the news while there's still time to do something about it.

August 1, 2017

Sessions puts general in charge of America's civilian prisons

Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that he has named an Army general to be in charge of the U.S. federal prisons system.

Gen. Mark Inch, who had served as a military policeman and recently as head of Army Corrections, was named the director of the Bureau of Prisons. Inch is “uniquely qualified” to head up the federal prisons system, Sessions said.

Inch was previously responsible for detainee operations in Kabul, Afghanista

1 comment:

To a hammer everything looks like a nail... in this case, is an empty prison a good prison?

Keep prisons out of private hands. When a huge industry depends on keeping prisons full for its jam, let along bread and butter, all kinds of petty infractions will be listed to help it do so.

Spend the money on rehabilitation and half-way houses, instead.

Thanks, Tom________________________From WikiPediaThe concept known as the law of the instrument, otherwise known as the law of the hammer,[1] Maslow's hammer (or gavel), or the golden hammer,[a] is a cognitive bias that involves an over-reliance on a familiar tool. As Abraham Maslow said in 1966, "I suppose it is tempting, if the only tool you have is a hammer, to treat everything as if it were a nail."[2]The concept is attributed both to Maslow[3] and to Abraham Kaplan,[4][5] although the hammer and nail line may not be original to either of them. It has in fact been attributed "to everyone from Buddha to Bernard Baruch". Mark Twain has sometimes been credited with it, though it cannot be found in Twain's published writings.[6] Under the name of "Baruch's Observation", it has also been attributed to the stock market speculator and author Bernard M. Baruch.[7]

Sharlyn Lauby has drawn the following lesson from the law: "We need choose the tools we work with carefully." Some tools are adaptable, while others should be employed "only for their intended purpose".[8]

The English expression "a Birmingham screwdriver" meaning a hammer, references the habit of using the one tool for all purposes, and predates both Kaplan and Maslow by at least a century.[9]

In 1868, a London periodical, Once a Week, contained this observation: "Give a boy a hammer and chisel; show him how to use them; at once he begins to hack the doorposts, to take off the corners of shutter and window frames, until you teach him a better use for them, and how to keep his activity within bounds."[10]

SAY IT AGAIN, SAM

ABOUT THE EDITOR

The Review is edited by Sam Smith, who covered Washington under nine presidents, has edited the Progressive Review and its predecessors since 1964, wrote four books, been published in five anthologies, helped to start six organizations (including the DC Humanities Council, the national Green Party and the DC Statehood Party), was a plaintiff in three successful class action suits, served as a Coast Guard officer, and played in jazz bands for four decades.

ABOUT THE REVIEW

Regularly ahead of the curve, the Review has opposed federal drug policy for over 40 years, was a lonely media voice against the massive freeways planned for Washington, was an early advocate of bikeways and light rail, and helped spur the creation of the DC Statehood Party and the national Green Party,

In November 1990 it devoted an entire issue to the ecologically sound city and how to develop it. The article was republished widely.

Even before Clinton's nomination we exposed Arkansas political scandals that would later become major issues. .

We reported on NSA monitoring of U.S. phone calls in the 1990s, years before it became a major media story.

In 2003 editor Sam Smith wrote an article for Harper's comprised entirely of falsehoods about Iraq by Bush administration officials.

The Review started a web edition in 1995 when there were only 27,000 web sites worldwide. Today there are over 170 million active sites.

In 1987 we ran an article on AIDS. It was the first year that more than 1,000 men died of the disease.

In the 1980s, Thomas S Martin predicted in the Review that "Yugoslavia will eventually break up" and that "a challenge to the centralized soviet state" would occur as a result of devolutionary trends. Both happened.

In the 1970s we published a first person account of a then illegal abortion.

In 1971 we published our first article in support of single payer universal health care